Red Hat & Hedvig: Advancing containers, orchestration & storage

With KubeCon coming in a couple of weeks, now is a good time to describe the work we've done with Red Hat in the last few months. Partnering with Red Hat gives us new ways to connect with container-focused technologies, including OpenShift. Enterprises are getting serious about cloud-building and accelerating their DevOps strategies, and we make the journey easier by tying storage more closely with the technologies that matter.

Our early efforts around containers at Hedvig were simple: deliver integration with Docker to enable our storage platform to be used by developers, admins, and operators to deliver persistent, portable storage for microservices. Our certified Docker Volume Plugin enables this simple, yet important, capability. As the market advances, we see opportunity to extend API and CLI-level control and automation of the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform with orchestration tools like Kubernetes, Mesos, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm. Our ongoing work in this area enables stateful containerized applications to be provisioned along with the required storage.

Red Hat container-focused solutions are making significant headway in the market, helping to simplify, speed up, and orchestrate application development and deployment. At Hedvig, we use these same words to describe what we do with storage. By working together, Red Hat and Hedvig deliver the infrastructure, platform, and control that lets users take advantage of everything containers have to offer.

Putting Hedvig in a Container

One of the projects we worked on with Red Hat was to package our Hedvig Storage Proxy as a container image, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The Storage Proxy runs as a container on a Docker host to provide local flash-optimized storage services (deduplication, encryption, caching) to containers while directing I/O to the underlying Hedvig storage cluster. By making this available on the Red Hat Container Catalog, getting this component of the Hedvig solution is as easy as logging into the repository and running this command:

docker pull registry.connect.redhat.com/hedvig/proxy

What can you do with Hedvig and Red Hat?

You may be asking, "How do I connect software-defined storage with containers?" At its most basic level, you can connect Hedvig with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which features the Docker engine for running containerized workloads, using our Docker Volume Plugin. With the plugin installed, container images that include volume details that point to Hedvig as the driver, will create or attach to Hedvig Virtual Disks when the containers are started. Simple.

For OpenShift, you can extend this basic functionality by attaching containers that are defined inside pods to Hedvig storage using persistent volumes (PV) and persistent volume claims (PVC). See this blog for more details. When Kubernetes schedules pods, the storage is created and/or used as requested in the pod definition yaml file. Easy.

Resources for you to learn more

One of the cool things we’ve been able to do with Red Hat is to create some introductory materials that help communicate the message behind what we’re doing together. I’ll share these here so you can click through and learn a bit more:

Interested in even more? Watch our Hedvig v3.0 webinar where we introduced this and more! Just click below.

Eric Carter

Eric leads product marketing and before Hedvig held roles at Riverbed, EMC, and Legato Systems. He enjoys rocking the guitar along with his acoustic cover band in his free time. Eric has a BA in Public Relations from Pepperdine University.